After Effects playback speed

Here’s the result of some tests I ran a year or so back for a project. I have to admit, I don’t know the exact details any more and I would not consider the test “scientific” by a long shot… but the gist of it is that I wanted to work out how fast certain image sequence or video formats play back in After Effects (CC 2017 at that point I think). Playback was from an m.2 PCI-E SSD, so there was no bottleneck from either file system nor network. The images were 4k by 4k, if I remember correctly (for a large installation).

These were from renderings out of Cinema 4D R19 (or R18?).

Maybe this will help some of you narrow down your selection of certain file formats for testing. In any case, I can recommend giving the Edius / Grassvalley HQX codecs a try. They are very fast and small and support alpha channels.